In the Language Bank: Rea Peltola

Kielipankki – The Language Bank of Finland offers a comprehensive set of resources, tools and services in a high-performance environment. Rea Peltola tells us about her research on the semantics of animacy.

Who are you?

I am Rea Peltola, Professor of Finnish language and culture and Head of the Department of Nordic Studies at the University of Caen in Normandy, France. I am a member of the CRISCO research group. I am also a docent of the Finnish language at the University of Helsinki.

What is your research topic?

My roots are in the study of modal meaning structures, particularly in what is known as post-modality. It investigates the fading of modal meanings, or rather their intersubjective reorientation. Gradually, studying the expressions of permission and ability brought me to reflect on the semantics of animacy. I became interested in how grammar describes the characteristics of living beings, especially in terms of embodiment. For more than ten years now, I have been studying how human language deals with being an animal: How do we talk about other animals and their bodily experiences? How is human language used when interacting with another animal?

How is your research related to Kielipankki – the Language Bank of Finland?

In the thematic issue on interspecies pragmatics, co-edited with Mika Simonen, I studied reported animal inner speech in dialect data. At the time, I went through all the interviews in the Eastern dialects of the Finnish Dialect Corpus of the Syntax Archive, and collected passages where the speakers verbalised the thoughts of other species (e.g., se kuuloo hirvi että tuolla se mennöö se vihamies ’the moose can hear, like there he goes, the enemy’, Suomussalmi). These occurred especially when talking about hunting practices or work with another animal (usually a dog or horse). In general, these passages described how animals reasoned based on their sensory perception.

With Outi Duvallon, we have analysed the Language Bank of Finland’s corpora to investigate the modal meaning and use of the Finnish sai kuin saikin (’V1 kuin V1=kin’) type of reduplicative construction in text corpora from different time periods, particularly in Early Modern Finnish, as well as contemporary language use in the Yle News Archive and the Suomi24 online discussion. We noticed, for example, that the epistemic use of the construction that was at the time perhaps still in formation (e.g. tässä minä sinun nuorin poikasi olen, kuin olenki ’here I am, your youngest son, as sure as I stand’, Salmelainen 1863), already present in older material, has gained new momentum in the chain-like structures of online conversations. The reduplicative construction can be used to align with the position of the other participant expressed in an earlier message (e.g., laulajalla on kuin onkin loistava ääni ’the vocalist indeed has an excellent voice’, Suomi24).

Recently, Arnaud Godet and I have been investigating Finnish modal verbs that express rather specific abilities related to the circumstances, such as tarjeta (’to not to be cold’), jaksaa (’to have enough energy’), malttaa (’to have patience’) and raaskia (’to have the heart to do something’). We analysed their grammar and uses in the classics of literature, in the journals of the 1990s and 2000s, and in the Finnish Dialect Corpus of the Syntax Archive and Digital Morphology Archives. We also obtained a small amount of data from the Arkisyn conversations. We compared the selected verbs in terms of complement constructions, person reference and negative affinity. Our aim was to shed light on their shared force dynamics structure underlying their meanings and, on the other hand, to understand the mutual relationships and division of labour between these verbs.

Selected publications

Duvallon, Outi & Peltola, Rea. 2025. La construction réduplicative finnoise V1 kuin V1=kin : une ressource modale et discursive. Études finno-ougriennes. Painossa.

Peltola, Rea. 2023. Verbalizing animal inner speech. Journal of Pragmatics 217, 109–122.

Peltola, Rea. 2021. Unfolding constructions: Postmodal auxiliaries in mirative complement patterns. Teoksessa Hilpert, Martin & Cappelle, Bert & Depraetere, Ilse (toim.), Modality and Diachronic Construction Grammar, 149–184. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Corpora

Links

The FIN-CLARIN consortium consists of a group of Finnish universities along with CSC – IT Center for Science and the Institute for the Languages of Finland (Kotus). FIN-CLARIN helps the researchers of Social Sciences and Humanities to use, refine, preserve and share their language resources. The Language Bank of Finland is the collection of services that provides the language materials and tools for the research community.